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Dancer from the Dance: A Stage Adaptation of the 1978 Novel by Andrew Holleran
Get PDFMalone is a law-school dropout looking for love in all the wrong places in 1970s New York. But when you’re gay, sometimes the “wrong places” are the only places where love is allowed to blossom. In this queer kaleidoscope of disco havens, subway stations, and cruisy parks on the Lower East Side, one man’s journey in romance is emblematic of the gay coming-of-age experience. The other major player in Dancer is Sutherland, a drug dealer and socialite who dresses in elaborate costumes and flies off to South America to gamble. Malone and Sutherland’s friendship thrives under the artificial light of the mirror ball and the blare of Patti Jo over the Twelfth Floor’s speakers. Can their love of light and beauty feed Malone’s soul? Are features and surfaces enough? Or is he destined to feel alone forever despite his repeated collisions with love, sex, violence, and the Dance
Modification, Transport, and Sources of Hydrocarbon Oxidation Products from Groundwater at Crude Oil and Diesel Spill Sites in Minnesota: Unveiling Common “ThEEMs” via Spectroscopy & Chromatography
Get PDFIn this thesis, petroleum-contaminated groundwater from three spill-affected Minnesota sites—two contaminated with crude oil; one with diesel—is investigated to elucidate whether differences in degradation products from different parent oils exist. After spill events, parent molecules from the leaked oil seep underground and undergo microbial degradation over time, transforming into hydrocarbon oxidation products (HOPs), water-soluble contaminants that infiltrate groundwater aquifers, flowing into nearby environments and towns while exhibiting environmental persistence, toxicity to aquatic biota, and potential risks to humans that become exposed. Spectroscopic and chromatographic study of the structural themes and spatial distributions of HOPs reveals preferential degradation of aliphatic (biolabile) over condensed aromatic (biorefractory) HOPs, with distinct diesel trends detected. Thus, correlations between crude oil- and diesel-based degradational products and the parent petroleum at spill sources were exposed at the three contaminated groundwater sites, offering insight for environmental risk assessment and mitigation strategies to better predict spill outcomes
Genetic aspects of resilience in the foundational seagrass Halodule wrightii: the role of genetic variation and gene expression in maintaining primary production
Get PDFSeagrasses are coastal foundation species which significantly contribute to the primary production of shallow water ecosystems and provide several services. However, seagrasses, like other coastal foundation species, are threatened by myriad anthropogenic stressors. Conservation is difficult in ecosystems under multiple threats where the factors that contribute to production are not easily elucidated. Genetic diversity and gene expression may be related to the function and stability of populations but are rarely considered in management plans. High genetic diversity and the associated trait variation within a population are known to contribute to higher function and stability of a population. Additionally, individual-level changes in the expression of photosynthesis and stress related genes can trigger physiological responses during a disturbance and increase chances of survival. In Chapter 1, I review the relationship between genetic diversity, function, and stability in five coastal foundation species, in order to assess the current state of knowledge and inform on directions of study beneficial for seagrass conservation. The synthesis of 129 relevant publications indicated more instances of neutral to positive relationships between genetic diversity and function than negative ones. However, the research is limited to a few genera and relies on unreplicated observational studies lacking controls or baseline data. In chapters two and three, I turn focus to the seagrass, Halodule wrightii, an important foundation species native to the Gulf of Mexico, where genetic aspects are rarely studied in relation to conservation. I relate metrics of production to genetic diversity (Chapter 2) and gene expression (Chapter 3) in the context of abiotic variation. Genetic diversity was not associated with bed production metrics. Gene flow between bays was limited and beds exhibited significant isolation by distance and by environment due to temperature range. Abiotic variation was, however, associated with belowground biomass. In Chapter 3, measures of photosynthetic efficiency and the expression of stress and photosynthesis genes were positively related. These measures were also related to changes in abiotic variation that occurred after a hurricane. These findings provide insights on how best to manage and restore beds of seagrass and suggest genes that could be used as early indicators of stress
Advancing Network Security: Attack Response, Anomaly Detection, and Domain-Adaptive Intrusion Detection Systems
Get PDFDigital network expansion necessitates enhanced security mechanisms against cyber threats, particularly Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks and anomalies across network environments. This dissertation presents systematic advancements in network intrusion detection systems (NIDS) through three interconnected research phases: attack source identification, anomaly detection, and domain adaptation. The first phase of this dissertation introduces a novel Autonomous System (AS) traceback mechanism, addressing IP spoofing challenges in network attacks by efficiently identifying attack origins with minimal router involvement. By encoding AS numbers into IP packet headers using probabilistic packet marking, the method enables efficient reconstruction of attack paths. The second phase develops advanced anomaly detection models utilizing contractive autoencoders as the core architecture. This begins with a model specifically designed for DDoS detection, employing contractive autoencoders to capture normal network traffic patterns. An iterative threshold optimization enhances the model’s precision in distinguishing between benign and malicious activity. The next model targets the distinct challenges in IoT security, such as device heterogeneity and the lack of a unified anomaly detection objective. By integrating Deep SVDD with a Contractive Autoencoder, this approach enhances latent feature representations to improve the relevance of these representations for anomaly detection, enabling the identification of both known and unknown threats within IoT environments. The final model in this phase combines Contractive Autoencoders with K-means clustering, applying optimized hyperparameters to enhance anomaly detection across diverse network scenarios. The third phase of this dissertation focuses on domain adaptation to maintain detection effectiveness across diverse network environments. This model incorporates a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) as a feature extractor, alongside a Gradient Reversal Layer (GRL), to learn domain-invariant features. Trained on labeled source data, with a small subset of labeled target data and a larger pool of unlabeled target data, this approach demonstrates consistent performance across different dataset pairs, addressing the challenge of domain shifts in NIDS and ensuring robustness across varied network conditions
The Search for Unmarked Cemeteries: Case Studies in St. James and St. John the Baptist Parish, Louisiana
Get PDFThis thesis presents research in St. James and St. John the Baptist Parishes in Louisiana. These two parishes sit in an eighty-five-mile stretch by the Mississippi River that historically contained plantations with enslaved laborers and currently houses petrochemical plants. This study analyzes the development of cultural resource management (CRM) methodologies for identifying unmarked cemeteries. It uses this information to evaluate an environmental justice research group’s open-source database, which proposes a new source for identifying unmarked ancestral cemeteries.
The dataset collected and created for this thesis shows that using land anomalies as a methodology in searching for cemeteries as a cultural resource will help lessen disparity when surveying and recording archaeological sites. This thesis solidifies the multifaceted methodologies of archaeology while introducing a newer one intended to better include the public in the Section 106 process